How to list shares on a Windows machine using Samba? (error NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED)

Question

I want to find out about the Windows XP "shares" on my wife's windows machine by browsing from my Linux machine using Samba. I am relatively clueless about both windows and samba. I tried a basic operation from the command line and got this error:

: nr@homedog 8088 ; smbclient -L sapphire
timeout connecting to 140.247.184.252:445
timeout connecting to 140.247.184.252:139
Connection to sapphire failed (Error NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED)

I've Googled this error message and have determined that a lot of people have similar problems, but I can't find a workaround. I suspect my wife has to grant some sort of access or permission on the Windows side. Any suggestions?

Solution

OK, it turns out the problem was with the Samba smb.conf configuration file. The NetBIOS name of my wife's machine happened to coincide with the hostname of a machine on a network searched in my /etc/resolv.conf. For some reason Samba requests and Nautilus were going to this machine instead of to the machine on the local net.

I fixed the problem by telling /etc/resolv.conf not to search the offending domain. At this point smbclient -L started working and so did remote mounts from Nautilus.

Comments

[Norman Ramsey]

I won't accept a solution unless it works :-)

[Norman Ramsey]

It doesn't work. My smb.conf seems to be doing a DNS lookup on sapphire, then timing out.

[streetlight]

:)) I don't ask to! Just walk through your recent questions to increase accept rate: 25% looks like "he asks and disappears" :) BTW yesterday I tried to print from Windows Server 2008 (R1) to samba-shared printer with no success. 2008 is based on Vista, Seven - too. Thank God they've added IPP printing instead! I believe the only solution for now is to use FTP :(